PuTTY wish paste-semantics

summary: Alternative semantics for copy and pasteclass: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.fixed-in: 018aa5764505634e86df7c6eff6aae4ce98f6fe4

Some people don't like the X-style copy/paste semantics in which
selecting text automatically copies it to the clipboard and clicking
a mouse button is enough to perform a paste. These semantics make
copy and paste something of a hair-trigger operation - a misplaced
click and drag can destroy valuable data from another application
which you'd had in the clipboard, and equally a misplaced mouse
action can paste all sorts of weird text into an unsuspecting PuTTY.

An alternative would be to adopt conventional Windows-style copy and
paste keys: selecting text has no direct effect, Ctrl-Ins copies it
to the clipboard, and Shift-Ins pastes it. (We actually already
support Shift-Ins to paste.) We could also support ^C and ^V to do
the same things, although this would be unlikely to be very useful
since those key combinations are almost always needed to perform
server-side actions.

Another possibility is that perhaps the mouse-clicks-only copy and
paste could still work within a single PuTTY window, but Shift-Ins
and Ctrl-Ins would be required in order to interact with the main
Windows clipboard. This might strike a balance between convenience
and safety (although it requires the user to keep in mind that there
are two separate clipboards, so it wouldn't make a good default
configuration).

Other options would be to introduce Copy and Paste entries in the
System menu (like DOS boxes), or in the toolbar (if we ever add
one). And if the current mouse-driven pasting is disabled, then that
would leave the right mouse button free to bring up a context menu
which could contain Copy and Paste as menu items.

These would certainly be configurable options if we do them
at all - enough people, including the developers, like the copy and
paste the way it is that we would never consider removing the
current behaviour.

Update: as of 2003-11-21, there is a new mouse-handling
option whereby the right button brings up a context menu containing
a Paste option, rather than pasting directly.

2017-12-17: most of the above is now possible (except that the
keys involved are Ctrl-Shift-C/V).